Hindsight on foresight: Remembering the New Zealand Foresight Project

This paper seeks to provide an alternative history of the New Zealand Foresight Project of the 1990s by documenting how the project was perceived and remembered by key actors in foresight activities. Open-ended interviews with key actors closely involved in foresight activities have been woven together to create richly descriptive narrative-a story-of the project and its context(s). This paper finds that the meaning of the New Zealand Foresight Project (NZFP) has yet to stabilize-the unevenness in understanding among the actors, noted only in passing in an earlier study of the NZFP, appears to be a defining rather than incidental feature of the project and its legacy. There is significant disagreement about the aims, objectives, and outcomes of the project, and whether the NZFP should, ultimately, be understood as a success or failure. This paper also identifies a number of shortcomings in the NZFP that might serve as lessons and/or warnings for future, large-scale foresight activities.